American author,
outstanding representative of naturalism, whose novels depict real-life
subjects in a harsh light. Dreiser's novels were held to be amoral, and he
battled throughout his career against censorship and popular taste. This
started with SISTER CARRIE (1900). It was not until 1981 that the work was
published in its original form. Dreiser's principal concern was with the
conflict between human needs and the demands of society for material success.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana.
His parents were German immigrants whose marriage resulted in thirteen
children. Because his father was often ill and unemployed, the family struggled
against poverty throughout Dreiser's childhood. In rebellion against his
father's obsessive religiosity, Dreiser left home at fifteen for Chicago. There, after
three years of menial jobs, he found work as a newspaper reporter. While
Dreiser churned out hackwork for various periodicals, he was reading the
deterministic philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the novels of Honore de Balzac,
who believed in the evolutionary doctrine that life is a struggle in which
instinctive human desires are often in conflict with conventional morality.

"A woman should some day write the complete philosophy
of clothes. No matter how young, it is one of the things she wholly
comprehends. There is an indescribably faint line in the matter of man's
apparel which somehow divides for her those who are worth glancing at and those
who are not. Once an individual has passed this faint line on the way downward
he will get no glance from her. There is another line at which the dress of a
man will cause her to study her own." (from Sister Carrie)

Theodore Dreiser was born in Sullivan, Indiana,
the ninth of ten children. His parents were poor. In the 1860s his father, a
devout Catholic German immigrant, had attempted to establish his own woolen
mill, but after it was destroyed in a fire, the family lived in poverty.
Dreiser's schooling was erratic, as the family moved from town to town. He left
home when he was 16 and worked at whatever jobs he could find. With the help of
his former teacher, he was able to spend the year 1889-1890 at Indiana University. Dreiser left after only a
year. He was, however, a voracious reader, and the impact of such writers as
Hawthorne, Poe, Balzac, Herbert Spencer, and Freud influenced his thought and
his reaction against organized religion.

In 1892 Dreiser started to write for the Chicago Globe, and
moved to a better position with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In 1898 he
married Sara White, a Missouri
schoolteacher, but the marriage was unhappy. Dreiser separated permanently from
her in 1909, but never earnestly sought a divorce. In his own life Dreiser
practised his principle that man's greatest appetite is sexual - the desire for
women led him to carry on several affairs at once. His relationship with Yvette
Szekely Eastman is recorded in Dearest Wilding by Yvette Eastman (1995) - she
was 16 and Dreiser 40 years older when they met.

As a novelist Dreiser made his debut with Sister Carrie, a
powerful account of a young working girl's rise to success and her slow
decline. "She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the
illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting
characterized her thoughts it was certainly not for advantages now being given
up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when
the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a
pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review,
and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were
irretrievably broken." (from the 1981 edition) The president of the
publishing company, Frank Doubleday, disapproved of the work - Dreiser
illuminated the flaws of his characters but did not judge them and allowed vice
to be rewarded instead of punished. No attempt was made to promote the book.
Sister Carrie was reissued in 1907 and it became one of the most famous novels
in literary history. Among its admirers was H.L. Mencken, an aspiring
journalist, whom Dreiser had hired as a ghost-writer in his paper. William
Wyler's film version, starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones, was made at
the height of the Cold War and McCarthy era. Paramount executives delayed the
releasing of the film - they thought the picture was not good for America and it
was a flop. "It was a depressing story", said Wyler, "and it
might not have been a success anyway."

The 500 sold copies of his first novel and family troubles
drove Dreiser to the verge of suicide. He worked at a variety of literary jobs,
and as an editor- in- chief of three women's magazines until 1910, when he was
forced to resign, because of an office love affair. In 1911 JENNIE GERHARDT,
Dreiser's second novel, appeared. In the story a young woman, Jennie, is
seduced by a senator. She bears a child out of wedlock but sacrifices her own
interests to avoid harming her lover's career. A passage in which Jennie's
lover Lester Kane, the son of a wealthy family, tells her about contraceptives,
was removed by Ripley Hitchcock, the editor at Harper & Brothers. Jennie
Gerhardt was followed by novels based on the life of the American
transportation magnate Charles T. Jerkes, THE FINANCIER (1912), and THE TITAN
(1914), which show the influence of the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer
and Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch. Last volume of the trilogy, THE
STOIC, was finished in 1945.

"At the height of his success, when he had settled old
scores and could easily have become the smiling public man, he chose instead to
rip the whole fabric of American civilization straight down the middle, from
its economy to its morality. It was the country that had to give ground."
(Nelson Algren, in Nation, 16 May, 1959)

Dreiser's semi-autobiographical novel THE 'GENIUS' (1915) was
censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The book remained
off the market until Liveright reissued it five years later. Dreiser's
commercially most successful novel was AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), which was
adapted for screen for thefirst time in 1931, directed by Josef von Sternberg.
Dreiser had objected strongly to the version because it portrayed his youthful
killer as a sex-starved idle loafer. The second time was in 1951 under the
title A Place
in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. During the filming
the stars became attached to one another, which is reflected in the tenderness
of their performance. The director George Stevens won an Academy Award, as did
the writers Michael Wilson and Harry Brown for Best Screenplay. However, Robert
Hatch in the New Republic (September 10,1951) dismissed
the film. "Unfortunately, the power and bite of the book have been lost in
the polite competence of the screen. These are such nice, such obviously
successful people, they must be playing characters... there doesn't seem much
use in dragging Dreiser's classic off the shelf just to dress it in this
elegant, ambivalent production..." The book made Dreiser the champion of
social reformers, but his later works did not attain similar notice.

An American Tragedy tells the story of a bellboy, Clyde
Griffiths, indecisive like Hamlet, who sets out to gain success and fame. After
an automobile accident, Clyde is employed by a
distant relative, owner of a collar factory. He seduces Roberta Alden, an
employee at the factory, but falls in love with Sondra Finchley, a girl of the
local aristocracy. Roberta, now pregnant, demands that Clyde
marry her. He takes Roberta rowing on an isolated lake and in this dreamlike
sequence 'accidentally' murders her. Clyde's
trial, conviction, and execution occupy the remainder of the book. Dreiser
points out that materialistic society is as much to blame as the murderer
himself. Dreiser based his study on the actual case of Chester Gillette, who
murdered Grace Brown - he hit her with a tennis racket and pushed her overboard
at Big Moose
Lake in the Adirondack
in July 1906. An American Tragedy was banned in Boston in 1927.

Much of Dreiser's works evolved from his own experiences of
poverty. Among his rare excursions into the realm of fantasy is the ghost story
'The Hand' (1920). It is a tale of murder and the haunting of the killer, but
again behind the nightmare of the protagonist are the familiar themes of
Dreiser's novels - fear of losing ones social position, feelings of moral guilt
arising during the unrestrained struggle for success.

"People did live, then, after they were dead, especially
evil people - people stronger than you, perhaps. They had the power to come
back, to haunt, to annoy you if they didn't like anything you had done to
them." (from 'The Hand')

In 1919 Sherwood Anderson wrote about Dreiser: "... he
is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps forty,
perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something grey and bleak and hurtful, that
has been in the world perhaps forever, is personified in him." After his
wife's death in 1942, Dreiser married his cousin Helen Richardson, who had been
his companion from 1919. Dreiser died in Hollywood,
California, on December 28, 1945. In the last months
of his life, Dreiser joined the Communist Party. In the 1920's Dreiser had
travelled in Russia
and depicted his experiences in DREISER LOOKS AT RUSSIA (1928). During the
reign of J. Edgar Hoover, Dreiser was considered a security risk and the F.B.I.
had a dossier on him. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s (Hemingway, John Dos
Passos, André Malraux, C. Day Lewis etc.), Dreiser had travelled to Spain during
the civil war in support of the socialist government. Only a small number of
writers supported Franco - George Santayana and Ezra Pound were the most
famous. "He had an enormous influence on American literature during the
first quarter of the century - and for a time he was American literature, the
only writer worth talking about in the same breath with the European masters.
Out of his passions, contradictions, and sufferings, he wrenched the art that
was his salvation from the hungers and depressions that racked him. It was no
wonder that he elevated the creative principle to a godhead and encouraged by
word and example truthful expression in others." (from Theodore Dreiser:
An American Journey 1908-1945 by Richard Lingeman, 1991)

For further reading: Theodore Dreiser by B. Rascoe (1926);
Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free by D. Dudley (1933);
Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature by R.H. Elias (1949); Theodore Dreiser by
F.O. Matthiessen (1951); The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, ed. by C. Shapiro and
A. Kazin (1955); Theodore Dreiser by P.L. Gerber (1964); Dreiser by W.A.
Swanberg (1965); Theodore Dreiser by M. Thader (1965); Theodore Dreiser: His
World and His Novels by R. Lehan (1969); Homage to Theodore Dreiser by R.P.
Warren (1971); Theodore Dreiser by J. Lundquist (1974); Theodore Dreiser: A
Primary and Secondary Bibliography by D. Pizer (1975); The Novels of Theodore
Dreiser by D. Pizer (1977); Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City,
1871-1907 by Richard Lingeman (1986); The Gospel of Wealth in the American
Novel by Arun Mukherjee (1987); After Eden by Conrad Eugene Ostwalt (1990);
Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1908-1945 by Richard Lingeman (1991);
Dearest Wilding by Yvette Eastmaned, ed. by Thomas P. Riggio (1995); Love That
Will Not Let Me Go, ed. by Marguerite Tjader (1998); An American Tragedy by
Paul A. Orlov (1998); Dreiser and Veblen Saboteurs of the Status Quo by Clare
Virginia Eby (1999); Reading the Sympton by Mohamed Zanyani (1999) - See also:
H.L. Mencken

Selected works:

SISTER CARRIE, 1900 - film 1952, dir. by William Wyler,
starring Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones. "A famous satirical novel is
softened into an unwieldy narrative with scarcely enough dramatic power to
sustain interest despite splendid production values. Heavy pre-release cuts
remain obvious, and the general effect is depressing; but it it very good to
look at." (Halliwell's Film Guide, 1987)

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, 1925 - Amerikkalainen murhenäytelmä -
film in 1931, directed by Josef von Sternberg, starring Phillips Holmes and
Sylvi Sidney. "It is the first time, I believe, that the subjects of sex,
birth control and murder have been put into a picture with sense, taste and
reality." (Pare Lorentz) - A Place in the Sun, 1951, dir. by George
Stevens, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor

MOODS, CADENCED AND DECLAIMED, 1926

CHAINS, 1927

DREISER LOOKS AT RUSSIA, 1928

A GALLERY OF WOMEN, 1929

EPITAPH, 1929

MY CITY, 1929

TRAGIC AMERICA,
1931

DAWN, 1931

LIVING THOUGHTS OF THOREAU, 1939

AMERICA IS
WORTH SAVING, 1941

THE BULWARK, 1946

THE STOIC, 1947

THE BEST SHORT STORIES, 1947

LETTERS OF THEODORE DREISER, 1959

NOTES ON LIFE, 1974

AN AMATEUR LABORER, 1983 (edited and introduced by Richard W.
Dowell, with James L. W. West and Neda M. Westlake)